First lets understand why an existing blogger may need to create a private blog post or an entire WordPress blog private.

If you’re like most bloggers, you’re probably always trying to get more traffic to your website. However, sometimes you might have a specific situation where you want to go the other way and either make a single blog post (or page) private or make your entire blog private.

This can be helpful if you want to make a special page for only certain people (like members-only content) or if you just want a private place to share your thoughts. On a short-term basis, it’s also helpful for previewing content in a live environment without exposing your readers to content that you’re not ready to publish.

In this post, I’m going to share two different ways to make WordPress private. You’ll learn:

How to make a single blog post or page private

How to make your entire WordPress site private

Let’s get started…

How To Make A Single WordPress Post Or Page Private

WordPress actually has the feature to make a post or page private in the core WordPress software. But to get the most from this feature, it helps to know a few tricks. I’ll discuss why in a second.

First, let’s go through the basic process of making a post private:

To access the privacy settings for a post or page:

Edit the post or page that you want to make private

Look for the Visibility option under the Publish box on the right

Click Edit

Then, you have two options:

Password protected – users who try to view the post will need to enter a password before they can see it.

Private – only users who are logged in and have high-level privileges can see the post. Anyone else who tries to access the post via its direct URL will see a 404 error page.

Below, I’m going to go through exactly how these two options function and share some helpful tricks you can use to make them more flexible.

WordPress Password Protected Visibility Guide

When you select Password protected, you’ll get an option to enter your password:

The blog post will still show up on your blog archive list (that means anonymous visitors will still see it in the list), only now it will have Protected: display before the blog post’s title:

Anyone who clicks on the post will see a login page:

Only after entering the password can they see the post.

All in all, it’s pretty straightforward. But here’s one cool tip that not a lot of people know about:

If you make all the passwords on your private posts the same, a user can unlock all of those posts just by entering the password once. So once they enter the password on the first post, all the other posts will be available.

On the other hand, if you use different passwords, users will need to enter the password for each post with a different password.

Pretty cool, right?

By making the passwords the same (or different), you can easily make multiple posts private and still have detailed control over who has access.

WordPress Private Visibility Guide

If you choose to make a post or page Private instead of Password protected, then the only people who will be able to see the post are logged in users with the user role of Administrator or Editor:

Users who are logged in and have those user roles will be able to see the post. The only difference is that WordPress adds Private: in front of the post’s title (instead of Protected: like with the password example above):

Additionally, when you make a post Private, it will not show up in your blog archive page. Again, that’s another difference from password protection.

If someone tries to access the private post’s URL directly, they’ll see a standard 404 error page like this:

Like password protection, I have another neat trick for you to make this functionality more powerful:

If you want people other than administrators and editors to be able to see your private content, you can use a free plugin called User Role Editor to give them that ability.

For example, to let regular logged in users see private posts, you can:

Go to Users → User Role Editor (after installing and activating the plugin)

Make sure that you see Subscriber in the drop-down (this is the default role for regular users at your site)

Check the boxes for read_private_pages and read_private_posts

Click Update to save your changes

Now, even your regular WordPress users will be able to see all of your private posts and pages (as long as they’re logged in).

How To Make Private website using WordPress

Sometimes, you might want to go beyond individual posts and pages to make your entire WordPress site private.

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A blog scientist by the mind and a passionate blogger by heart ❤️. Fountainhead of ShoutMeLoud (Award winning blog), speaker at various international forums.
Life motto: Live while you can! Teach & inspire while you could & Smile while you have the teeth.